ACCORDING to the UK Government’s website, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) “monitors human rights, protecting equality across nine grounds – age, disability, sex, race, religion and belief, pregnancy and maternity, marriage and civil partnership, sexual orientation and gender reassignment”.
The EHRC’s own website says: “Our role is to make the country a fairer place by enforcing and upholding the laws that safeguard everyone’s right to fairness, dignity and respect”.
Whichever of these definitions you look at, it couldn’t be clearer that the EHRC is no longer fulfilling its role, and is entirely unfit for purpose.
In recent years it has overseen not the protection but the utter destruction of equality – particularly when it comes to “gender reassignment”. The rights of trans people in particular to fairness, dignity and respect have been almost entirely eroded.
This is most obviously exemplified by the code of practice published by the EHRC last week following the April 2025 Supreme Court ruling on the Equality Act 2010.
This guidance tells service providers that trans people should be barred from using the gendered services – including toilets and changing rooms – that reflect their true gender, directing them instead to so-called third spaces such as disabled facilities.
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It’s slightly watered down from even more discriminatory interim guidance published a year ago, which suggested people should be expected to present their birth certificates to confirm their sex if there was doubt about which facilities they should be using, and also explicitly prohibited the formation of trans-inclusive clubs and associations for women and LGBT+ people.
Even so, the newest version of the guidance is blatantly unworkable, discriminatory and – in the view of numerous legal experts – clearly a violation of the human rights of trans people as set out in the European Court of Human Rights.
The legal case of Christine Goodwin vs United Kingdom in 2002 clearly demonstrated that to treat trans people as an “other” or a “third sex” rather than as the gender they are living as is a violation of their rights to privacy and dignity.
The case led to the Gender Recognition Act 2004, which was an imperfect but substantial remedy to this violation for more than 20 years.
That changed last year when the Act was rendered largely meaningless by the Supreme Court ruling and subsequent decisions around how it should be implemented.
The situation now is arguably worse than pre-2004, as never before have organisations been expected to prohibit trans people from using the toilets they’ve been using for generations.
The reality is that forcing trans people to use ”third spaces” – which often don’t exist or are rightly prioritised for disabled people who actually need them – will force trans people to out themselves to friends, colleagues and service providers.
It will prevent trans people from being able to just get on with their lives. It will undoubtedly result in many withdrawing from public life. It is inhumane and clearly incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights.
The blame for this horrendous situation lies squarely with the Labour Party. While I believe the Supreme Court failed to accept balanced evidence to make a considered and fair decision in its ruling, I respect the independence of the judiciary and the courts’ role is to interpret laws, not to set them.
If the Supreme Court’s ruling differs from the original intention of the Equality Act 2010 – which all evidence shows it did – then it is clearly the responsibility of politicians to amend the law, not to sit back and accept flawed law which puts people’s human rights at risk.
The failure of the Labour Party to do the right thing and update the Equality Act following the ruling will be just one of the many travesties this government will be remembered for decades to come.
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But all of this is made worse by an ideologically extremist EHRC which is taking the Supreme Court’s ruling to the furthest, most exclusionary interpretation possible – a position they’ve already had to slightly water down due to legal action by the Good Law Project – and a Labour Party which is not just letting it get on with it, but is actively responsible given the board of commissioners is appointed and directed by the Women and Equalities Minister, currently Bridget Phillipson.
One of those commissioners, Alasdair Henderson, was appointed as interim chair of the EHRC Scotland committee. Following his appointment, which should worry everyone, the Good Law Project reported that he had been criticised in 2020 for liking posts criticising Black Lives Matter protesters and describing the words misogynist and homophobe “highly ideological propaganda terms”.
The Good Law Project further reported on Henderson’s links to the anti-abortion movement – he previously served as the director of the Lawyers’ Christian Fellowship, which was linked with the Alliance Defending Freedom, a US-based right-wing Christian group which played a key role in the overturning of Roe v Wade.
Henderson has regularly represented those opposed to equality and human rights, including representing clients in high-profile cases against abortion buffer zones and gender-affirming care, and right-wing evangelical group Christian Concern in a case relating to its opposition same-sex marriage.
Henderson is now responsible for enforcing and upholding equality in Scotland. What an absolute farce.
The EHRC in recent years has been a powerful force for anti-trans campaigning. What’s clear, including from the appointment of Henderson, is that its entire purpose has been eroded from inside and out.
From reproductive rights to marriage equality, to the rights of trans people, the EHRC is entirely failing in its core purpose. What an utter, utter shame.
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